Maintaining your web content and technology
A successful website should be implemented effectively and maintained professionally.
Maintaining your website is absolutely crucial. Although the technology may be outsourced to an Internet service provider (ISP), it is the responsibility of the website owner to ensure that the content of the site is accurate and updated regularly. This will help in promoting a positive image for the business, and attracting and retaining visitors to the site on a daily basis.
This guide provides an outline of the key phases in implementing a website, including the requirement for integration with back-office systems, together with advice on the ongoing maintenance tasks that need to be undertaken.
Implementing your website
Implementation means putting your website into operation. There are several phases that you will go through during the implementation process.
Implementing the website
When you implement your website, you will also need to train your staff. You should try to encourage staff involvement and feedback, as staff buy-in can make or break a technology project.
You should also consider setting up a cross-departmental taskforce to manage the implementation process - it will help with staff buy-in. It will also help ensure that the website is compatible with other systems throughout your business - for example your accounts package or customer database.
System testing
Before making the website accessible on the Internet, you should test it to see how well it responds to visitors. Poor testing or no testing is extremely risky. Errors that appear later can be expensive to correct.
The main purpose of testing is to assess the response times experienced by users and verify how the site functions under peak loads. It is also useful to see how easily users can access the site and navigate through the site.
Planning the rollout
Decide whether you will have a soft launch to existing customers, or simply make it available on the Internet to as wide an audience as possible.
Other issues to consider include:
- how you will market the site
- whether staff will need training in how to maintain web content
- deciding who will handle customer orders and queries
- working out which staff will require training and how much time it will take for them to adjust to the new system
Launching the website
At the launch of the site you should encourage existing customers to use it. You also need to ensure that you promote the web address (URL) and make the site easy to find on search engines.
Integrating your back-office systems
Linking your back-office and online systems together improves efficiency and could ultimately lead to greater customer satisfaction.
What are back-office systems?
Back-office systems run all your business administration processes. They are commonly an automated set of processes run by a piece of software on your computer. A back-office system, using an accounting package or database, will:
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record all sales transactions
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record all purchases
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update inventory records accordingly
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generate all appropriate paperwork - ie invoices and receipts
Many back-office systems can also carry shipping information and can produce reports that are invaluable in monitoring business performance and predicting future trends.
What is integration?
In practical terms integration means connecting your online e-commerce system with your back-office accounts and database systems, so that whenever a customer places an order online, your web store and back office deal with the sale as one. The online system accepts the order and then relays all this information back to the customer, while the back office records the transaction, adjusts inventory levels, generates an invoice and fulfils the order.
Benefits of integration
Benefits of integration include:
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greatly improved customer service
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faster response times
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enhanced capacity - greater automation allows you to deal with much larger volumes of business
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reduced costs in the medium and long term
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improved accuracy - with web store and back-office accessing the same data the chances of errors are greatly reduced
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better use of staff time
Integration solutions
The three main options for achieving integration are:
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purchasing off-the-shelf software that includes built-in back-office functionality
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employing a specialist software firm to create an interface between your systems
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using an application service provider
When looking for software solutions, make sure they support open standards such as XML (Extensible Mark-up Language).
Make sure your solution has the flexibility to deal with moving into new markets by having the ability to price in other currencies, for instance.
Reviewing your website for errors
It is important to keep your website up to date and error free. Sites lose credibility if their content is not updated or links do not work.
There are a number of actions you should undertake regularly as part of your website maintenance to ensure that the image of your business does not suffer because of the poor performance or user perception of your site.
Checking links
You should regularly check the links on your website to ensure that they all work. If there are significant numbers of links, consider checking a portion of them per week as a rotating maintenance operation.
Ensure that any time-sensitive links are removed when no longer relevant. It is annoying for your users to click on a link and find that the topic is no longer there or the special offer has expired.
Don't forget to check links to your own pages to ensure that every page is fully functional.
Checking advertising or sponsorship banners
If your website carries advertising or other types of sponsorship banner, then you need to check that the affiliate is still active. A common problem facing many website owners is a discontinued sponsor link, with your user clicking through and failing to reach the affiliate's home page.
Spelling and typos
Web designers will commonly use a syntax-checking program to catch errors and typos before the site is fully operational. However, you should also carry out such checks regularly once the site is live as content is added.
Maintenance tools
There are several popular tools you can use to assist in carrying out the various checks on HTML validation, links and spelling on your website.
Review your website using the analyser on the Dr Watson website - Opens in a new window.
Updating your website content
There is an expectation that websites will be constantly changing. If the content of your website remains static, users may not revisit it and you may lose opportunities to promote new products or services.
Your website should look fresh and appealing, and promote an image of success and stability in order to attract and retain visitors on a daily basis.
Approach to updating
Keep the content as up to date as possible. If you have a news section or announcements about new products then it is vital that these reflect the current situation.
If you have old news stories that you feel will be of interest to your visitors, then place them in an archive and allow this to be searched by interested parties.
Ensure that all the photos on your site are recent and include only your current staff.
Content management
If the number of pages on your website and the frequency with which they change is significant then you may wish to consider using a content management system.
Content management software has been developed to assist in the collection, assembly and management of content on a website, an intranet or an extranet.
Such software is particularly valuable where the content is dynamic and parts of it must be capable of changing depending upon circumstances such as the identification of the visitor, the day of the month, the price of the product, or the requests of the visitor.
Update notification
Remember to change the notice on your website stating when the site was last updated. Consider sending out an email alert to subscribers to let them know that updated content is available. Frequently updated information and articles will encourage visitors to come back again.
Website monitoring
It is important to monitor how your website performs and the way visitors use it.
Performance monitoring tools
Many websites are affected by slow performance, major outages, content errors, transaction failures and slow loading pages.
To address these problems consider using website performance-monitoring tools. These measure the response times of specific transactions or pinpoint the location of bottlenecks that slow down the website, such as the application server, a specific database, or a network router.
Some tools also identify the causes for slow page loading speeds, such as loading too many banners, too many high-resolution graphics files, or disk space problems.
Many of the main search engines - such as Google, Yahoo and MSN - provide tips, advice and tools to help you improve the performance of your website. Access the Google Webmaster tools on the Google website (registration required) - Opens in a new window.
Monitoring website traffic
One of the more important aspects of website maintenance is tracking how users find your website and what they do once they get there.
As part of monitoring the website traffic you need to know how many visitors click on your pages, how many pages they visit and which pages they spend most time on. All of this information is necessary to identify a need to upgrade the site or customise features to address visitor needs.
The information that can be gathered as part of a traffic-monitoring exercise includes:
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the date and time that each visitor accessed your site
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the individual Internet protocol address of each visitor's computer
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how they have arrived at your site, for example if they were referred to it by a search engine
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the number of pages that every visitor viewed, shown by the time they accessed each page and the length of time spent viewing each page
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the type of browser and operating system used by each visitor
This information also forms valuable feedback on your marketing activities. It can help indicate the success or otherwise of a marketing campaign as well as showing where specific promotional activities should be focused.
Your Internet service provider (ISP) should provide you with a range of traffic-monitoring options as part of the service they offer. Alternatively, there are a number of free services that can help you identify where visitors to your site come from and how they use your site. One of these is Google Analytics. This service is simple to use and can help you identify which aspects of your online presence are working.
Website maintenance options
Although you have several options for how maintenance activities on your website are undertaken, there are four main approaches.
Do it yourself
You can carry out the maintenance in-house using a variety of inexpensive tools. These allow you to carry out a range of routine maintenance activities such as validating your site's HTML code and checking for broken links.
Updating a site's content can be time consuming. If you don't have a dedicated webmaster, then you must ensure that the person given responsibility has sufficient time.
Ad-hoc basis
You can pay your Internet service provider (ISP) on an "as required" basis to carry out maintenance and updating activities. This is a viable option if the changes are relatively infrequent. However, as the volume of content on your site grows it will become less cost effective.
Maintenance agreement
The most common approach is to set up a maintenance agreement with your ISP or website developer. This will take account of the need for regular and frequent updates to the content and ongoing checking and monitoring activities. The fee will usually be fixed on a monthly or quarterly basis.
User tools
The final option is provided by an increasing number of suppliers who offer easy-to-use tools, such as simple content management software, that enable end users to update parts of the website themselves. Such tools can be used on their own or as part of a general maintenance contract.
Maintenance budgets
Whichever option you decide to adopt, ensure that you have fully budgeted for it - there will be a charge even for routine updates to your site.
You also need to take account of more significant upgrading or redesigning of the site, which is time consuming and expensive. Assign a budget for more radical changes to the site in addition to the routine maintenance.
Evaluating progress
An essential part of the overall website maintenance activity is to periodically review the performance of the website, in order to establish whether it is achieving the hoped-for benefits, and help identify areas for potential enhancement.
Set targets
At the outset of any e-commerce or website development project you need to set specific targets in terms of your expectations of the new system. For example you may decide to:
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set goals for your e-commerce website - eg to bring in new business or cut the cost of each sale
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agree specific, measurable objectives for what you want to achieve - eg a percentage increase in sales or new customers
Evaluate
As part of the evaluation process you should:
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monitor and review the impact on your business against your initial set of targets and objectives
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continue to benchmark your site against those of your competitors and market leaders in order to assess any developments they have made and decide whether these are appropriate for your own site
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get feedback from staff, customers and suppliers on any changes you have made in order to ascertain how well they have been received
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review the success, or otherwise, of any marketing activities you have undertaken
Ideally you should look to evaluate the impact after six months and again after one year. Have you achieved your overall objectives? Document the lessons you have learned and look at how you could improve things further.
Reproduced courtesy of Business Link
